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Sauce for Fish and Fowl
The melted butter sauce makes a good condiment for fish by adding hard-boiled eggs, chopped fine, and for boiled fowl, by adding chopped oysters when it is simmering.
Egg Sauce. This may be made either with melted butter or with white sauce. Five or six hard-boiled eggs, cut into small slices, using only half the whites, are put into a sauce-pan, to half a pint of melted butter or white sauce, with a little cream, all poured onto the eggs hot. [243]
Two variations on one base: the period "melted butter," which is not simply butter but a flour-thickened butter sauce. Getting that right is the whole recipe.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not melted butterIn 19th and early 20th century English and American books, "melted butter" usually means butter thickened with flour and water or milk — closer to a plain white sauce than to drawn butter. That is why the recipe can offer it and white sauce as alternatives.
- Half a pintOne cup of sauce, which is enough to dress fish or fowl for four to six people. Five or six eggs is generous for that volume; the sauce will be very thick with egg, which is the point.
- Only half the whitesThe instruction is deliberate: too much cooked white makes the sauce rubbery and dilutes the colour. The recipe does not say what becomes of the rest. Keep all the yolks.
- The oystersChopped oysters go in at the end and need only a minute or two in the hot sauce, just until the edges firm. Anything longer and they tighten into rubber and leak liquor that thins the sauce.
- Heat managementAdd the hot sauce to the eggs rather than boiling the eggs in the sauce, as written. Once the eggs are in, hold it below a simmer — a flour-bound sauce with cream in it will catch on the bottom quickly.
- CreamA tablespoon or two, added at the end, is enough to loosen the sauce and take the edge off the flour. Warm it first if the sauce is already thick.
- What to serve it withEgg sauce belongs with poached or boiled white fish — cod, haddock, salmon — and with boiled chicken or turkey. Season with salt, white pepper and a squeeze of lemon; the original assumes the cook will do this without being told.
Egg sauce is one of the small family of English "melted butter" derivatives — parsley, caper, shrimp, oyster, egg — that a Victorian and Edwardian cook produced from a single thickened base by dropping in whatever the dish called for. Its persistence in American books has much to do with boiled salt cod and boiled fowl, both plain dishes that need a rich sauce to carry them, and egg sauce was the version requiring nothing beyond the pantry. The oyster variant reflects a period when oysters were cheap and shipped inland in barrels. The sauce was largely assumed knowledge, and the book is only reminding the cook of the proportions.